530 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[April 8, 1911. 
feathered tribe? love those old oaks in common 
with man and his servant animals. Warblers, 
vireos, thrushes, creepers and kinglets make 
them haunts of delight in summer, while the 
barred and snowy owls seek them as lofty 
perches in seasons of snow. 
How wonderful the volumes of lore the grove 
could write. How tremendous the chronicles 
and annals hidden away in their unspeaking 
souls. What is man to them? They know him 
only as an atom. Those wood fathers have 
listened to the lover and maid as they walked 
under the mystic moon, heard the sweet 
whispers which are everything to human hearts, 
have heard and laughed, for the earthly ideal is 
no greater in their sight than the moisture drop 
at one rootlet’s tip. They have seen the seed 
time, gazed on the harvest toil, known the 
cradle toddler and the tapping crutch, under¬ 
stood heavenly blessing and evil curse beyond 
all knowledge of mankind. They know and smile. 
The Oak Valley is a bourne of rest in a 
coign of the universe—the symbol of immortal 
mortality. 
The Haymakers of the Rock Slides* 
The small fur-clad haymakers of the West 
whose interesting habits are little known ex¬ 
cept to mountain climbers and mammalogists, 
bear the familiar name of conies. In Proverbs, 
in an enumeration of the creatures which "are 
little upon the earth but are exceeding wise 
we read—“The conies are but a feeble folk, 
yet make they their houses in the rocks.” In an 
enumeration of animals that are forbidden food 
for the Hebrews the cony again figures, "be¬ 
cause he cheweth the cud.” But curiously 
enough, the name cony appears to have slipped 
into the Bible through ignorance of oriental 
mammals, the Hebrew shaphan being trans¬ 
lated cony, old English for rabbit, though 
the rabbit was unknown in Syria until imported 
in later times. So the little animal whose name 
has been familiar to us since childhood was 
neither the cony of our Western States nor a 
rabbit, but apparently a Hyrax or daman, be¬ 
longing to an order of oriental mammals so 
remarkable in dentition and anatomical charac¬ 
ters that Cuvier placed them next the elephant 
and rhinoceros. African species of Hyrax were 
encountered by the Roosevelt Expedition and 
described and figured by Mr. Roosevelt in his 
“African Game Trails.”* 
Our Western cony or little chief hare, instead 
of resembling the strange little damans, so 
closely resembles the ordinary rabbits that it 
was once classed with them, and now stands in 
an adjoining genus —Ochotona. But though 
looking much like a small tailless Lepus. 
Ochotona’s habits set him quite apart. While 
the various rabbits live from sea level to 
timberline and in all localities from deep forest 
to open plains, the cony lives almost exclusively 
in slide rock, ta'us from lofty peaks. 
To those who have once climbed the noble 
mountains in which he makes his home, what 
treasured mountain memories are roused by 
the nasal yamp of our cony! How one’s heart 
warms at the sound! The big woodchucks 
that whistle from the talus boulders add to the 
keen zest of wild life, but do not elicit the feel¬ 
ing of friendly companionship the small conies 
evoke Original and interesting in their ways 
and withal as winsome and gentle as rabbits, 
the little fellows, like the familiar camp jays, 
are dear to the heart of the mountaineer, their 
voices from the rock slides rousing echo as 
*Pp. 318, 3t54—Tree hyrax, facing p. 220. 
companions in the big silent wastes of broken 
rock. 
Having known them in the California moun¬ 
tains we were doubly glad to find them in the 
New Mexico mountains. Near one camp, at 
THE LITTLE HAYMAKER RESTING AMONG HIS ROCKS. 
Photograph by Edward R. Warren. 
11,601 feet on Pecos Baldy, a rock slide that 
covered several acres made of stone cracked off 
from the rock wall above and wedged together 
in close confusion afforded them a congenial 
home. The place was alive with them and their 
sharp bleat was continually coming from one 
or another part of the slide. They were so 
tame that we climbed up to photograph them. 
Some were sunning themselves when we arrived 
on the scene; others squeaking and running 
about among the rocks on various errands. 
As they went trotting over the rocks they looked 
like little bags of meal with big ears and 
short legs, for, like rabbits, they show no 
anatotrr back of their ears. Their heads might 
have been modeled but their tailless bodies 
look as if smoothed off round with one pass of 
the modeling knife. 
Now, not only are these conies “exceed¬ 
ing wise” because being “feeble folk” they 
take refuge in the rocks, but because living in 
the high mountains they take advantage of the 
short summers to make hay, stacking up loads of 
dwarf clover, grass and weeds among the rocks 
to cure out of reach of rain, that they may 
have food during the long winters when snow 
covers the rock slides. Last year’s hay. mats 
of old dry weeds, were seen in the Pecos Baldy 
slide under some of the rocks, while fresh piles 
of green stuff were found under others. 
One of the small haymakers was hurrying 
back and forth hard at work. Going to one 
especial place in the weeds outside of the slide 
he would pick a green bouquet and carrying it 
in his mouth run back to his haystack under the 
rock. Once when carrying a load too big to see 
over, he ran plump against the foot of the 
photographer, frightening himself so that he 
scampered off and hid away in his cave. 
Another haymaker that I watched, an old on.e 
with brown fur, worked as if the cold storm 
had convinced him that winter was upon him. 
Unlike his systematic fellow who went and 
came to the same spots, he ran out into the 
weeds wherever the notion took him and dumped 
his load of hay under a number of different 
stones scattered about his end of the slide. He 
brought a variety of material, old brown leaves, 
fresh green grass, a bunch of asters, and once 
such a big bunch of cow parsnip that it was a 
wonder he wasn’t tripped up by it. When he 
was photographed—at ten feet, for he was ap¬ 
parently fearless—he was sitting on a rock 
with his mouth full of hay, a daisy sticking up 
from one corner like an Irishman’s pipe. While 
resting between loads, at my insistent call, “Go 
to work, Cony, go to work,” he would start 
off for his hay on a trot, perhaps startled by 
the voice, perhaps influenced by the urgency 
of the tone, which probably accorded with his 
meteorological observations. 
While the conies were storing hay, one of 
the reddish ground squirrels named lateralis 
from his side stripes, was also seen putting 
away winter stores in the rock slide. From one 
of his trips he returned with cheek pouches so 
stuffed out as to suggest a bad case of mumps. 
At the terrifying sight of a human being he 
stood up on his hind legs and put his paws to 
his breast as a startled woman presses her hand 
